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At Some Point during his interview with Irwin Hirsch, Benjamin Wolstein said that he views his clinical approach to psychoanalysis as being compatible with all other clinical analytic approaches. Yet his views, which Dr. Hirsch has skillfully and tenaciously helped to elucidate, are so radical, so startling when juxtoposed against other psychoanalytic positions, that one wonders how he could have claimed this. His position, as stated, is remarkable enough. When its implications are more fully drawn out, it becomes revolutionary. In an interview with Wolstein conducted by Gladys Guarton (1998), he said that he was interested in changing the basic nature of the field of psychoanalysis. This intention is apparent in the present interview.
To begin with, consider the implications of his views on resistance as applied to the act of an analytic therapist trying to listen to a patient. According to him, resistance against something or someone arises from a more fundamental concern: trying to adapt to the environmental surround. One is here attending more, for example, to another than to one's own experience. The purpose of resistance, he said, is also to effect a sense of separateness from the outside, and resisting another is one means of accomplishing this.
Listening focally to a patient's story, complaints, wishes, feelings, or thoughts reinforces the perception of the patient as being distinct from oneself. Furthermore, the therapist listens in order to be able to adapt to and form a relationship with the patient. Therefore, any effort to get a distinct sense of the patient becomes, in Wolstein's thinking, a form of counterresistance! Actually, the therapist may not be trying to resist something that the patient is attempting to do (e.g., influence the therapist's thoughts or feelings in a particular way). Rather, the very act of attending focally in an objectivistic way to the other creates the phenomenological reality of self and other to which one then tries to adapt.